The MTV special on the XBox 360 was shown in Ireland on Friday night. Having read some comments about it, I wasn’t expecting much detail – and boy did I not get it! The sub-heading in MTV’s article about the XBox 360 says it all.

This was all about music, multimedia, changeable face-plates, and being cool. The console itself hardly featured at all, but then, that wasn’t really the point. This show was in essence a music show with a little product placement, and was all about image and brand. The target audience will mostly be Internet-savvy, and will be able to get the low-down on the console for themselves.

It is interesting to see how Microsoft are attempting to leverage the penetration of the XBox and transform their console into a Media Centre. You’ll be able to watch DVDs, listen to CDs, stream audio and video from network-connected Windows machines, and possibly also the Internet (or XBox Live anyway), chat to other XBox Live users via video link – and all XBox 360 users will have access to XBox Live included (though not to play games!), view photos from your digital camera, listen to MP3s from your portable music device, and the list goes on.

You’ll also be able to play games with it

Tom’s Hardware Guide has a good article about the technical details of the XBox 360 here. 1 Teraflop of processing power used to be what supercomputers had!

Well, it’s official – it’s the XBox 360. Check out the official XBox 360 web site for pretty interactive images of the hardware.

Check out this promotional video from Microsoft.

Gamespot have a in-depth set of articles about the new console.

I’m sure that there are lots more sites with official info out there, and the flow of information has just begun. Pretty much all the speculation was spot on. The major items left unresolved are price and backward compatibility. The E3 press event on Monday may answer the second of those, but price point may not be announced till later in the year. There’s a lot of speculation that a $360 price tag will be applied

MTV are hosting a special show on the XBox 360, and more and more details about the console are emerging online. The show airs tonight in the U.S., and tomorrow in Ireland and the U.K. Eurogamer have continuously updated coverage here.

Much of the information is speculation based on leaked images, or images from ourcolony, but scans of a Danish gaming magazine seem to confirm much of the speculation. The main points that have emerged so far are:

• The name is definitley XBox 360.
• The controllers will be wireless, and rechargable via USB connectors on the XBox, or can take standard batteries too.
• The controllers will rumble – what will this do to the battery life?
• There will be up to 3 USB connectors on the box.
• It will come with built-in Wi-Fi.
• Widescreen, HDTV (720p, 1080i), Dolby Digital output as standard.
• There will be an optional hard drive, though it’s unclear whether there will be a 20GB disk as standard. Images of a 40GB disk have been seen on ourcolony.
• It’s likely that it will integrate with Windows Media Centre – perhaps streaming audio and/or video from your PC.
• New XBox Live options – silver and gold levels (details here at Eurogamer).

Most importantly, it looks like Halo 3 will be a launch title, and that Bungie have been working away at it since Halo 2 was completed. Now, Bungie have not confirmed that, and until I hear it from the horse’s mouth, I won’t be counting any chickens (to mix my metaphors!). However, Halo 3 as a launch title would make a huge amount of sense.

I always felt that Halo 2′s graphics engine was written with the next generation console in mind. As anyone who has played Halo 2 will have noticed, the cutscenes generated using the in-game graphics engine have a noticeable delay when the scene changes. Objects start with low levels of detail, and then the bump maps etc. are applied. It takes a while, and you can easily notice the level of detail increasing. This said to me that the algorithms were written so that the performance would be acceptable for the XBox, but would look really great on the next-gen XBox.

It looks like I’ll only have to wait till November, since apparently the XBox 360 will be released in Europe a week after the U.S. I expect that the price will be around €400, and there’s been speculation that game prices will increase with the arrival of the next-gen consoles. I don’t know whether I could wait till Christmas, and if Halo 3 is available at launch, then there’s no question – form an orderly queue behind me now!